There are times when you look at the familiar and find it unutterably weird. You look at the things that are part of your life, things inextricable from yourself and from your understanding of the world, and find them bewildering, alien, incomprehensible. How could such things have ever mattered to you? Or to anyone? You feel a soul-deep sense of dislocation. The world has clearly gone mad.

These are dangerous times, because the madness is probably in you. Such feelings of utter discombobulation are often the prelude to breakdown. They are also to be associated with life-changing experiences: the gap-year kid coming home to find that, impossibly, the world has not changed to accommodate the changes in himself.

I remember sitting in a pub on my return from my first trip to India, struggling to finish my pint and gazing in amazement at the quietness and the pallor and the pinkness, the orderliness and the incomprehensible ordinariness of Tulse Hill. I had lived in South London most of my life, and wasn't it peculiar? Wasn't it strange to the point of being incomprehensible? How could anyone live there or take it seriously?

This week, I find myself leafing through the sports pages in The Times. How can anyone take them seriously? Who are these people? How can they believe in what they are doing? Who reads this stuff? Who cares? I felt as if I was reading the “Phobos and Demos” slip edition of Life On Mars.

I am just back from China, where I have been watching the Olympic Games. I have been caught in the bubble, and I have been watching some of the finest sport I have seen in my life. I have been hurling words at the screen in unprecedented profusion.

All my mind has been taken up with the high and lonely pursuit of pure excellence and its inevitable capture - taking part as an observer, it must be said, rather than a participant, but all the same, the process has engrossed me entirely.

I am a wild and jingoistic patriot for the nation of excellence. I have visited the place a million times, but always on a tourist visa. All the same, I presume on this privilege to become the nation's most rabid supporter. So I have been all bound up with Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps and Yelena Isinbayeva - the best of the best of the best. This mad, over-reaching search for brilliance beyond mere victory has had me enthralled, high as a kite, drunk day after day on high-proof excellence.

So it's time for rehab. I can't carry on as I am. I mean, the transfer window is closing. Various footballers, agents, managers and football chairmen are throwing pouts or recoiling in well-simulated fits of righteous indignation. They are making definitive for all-time statements that will go into reverse tomorrow. “Never, ever leaving” means the deal is almost done; “total loyalty to my club” means the move is imminent; “never do business with these people” means the cheque's in the post.

Now I am sure that I will enjoy watching Dimitar Berbatov playing for Manchester United and perhaps setting up one of the great striking partnerships in the world with a reignited and liberated Wayne Rooney. But right now, memories of the modern pentathlon have more meaning for me, and the multimillion-pound manoeuvrings seem merely grotesque.

There has been some actual football played. Arsenal won something and Cesc Fàbregas, a player I adore watching, is back among us and doing his stuff. But my head is still full of the super-heavyweight weightlifter weeping on stage: and it is all rather unreal. Oh, I was amused to see that the England one-day team had wiped the floor with the South Africans, but who are these guys? How did Kevin Pietersen get to be captain? Is there anything cricket that matters beyond the chase for the rupee?

A British woman has reached the third round of the US Open tennis tournament, that alone is enough to convince me that something has gone seriously wrong with reality. It doesn't help that her name is Anne Keothavong. Perhaps the entirety of yesterday's Times was a spoof edition slipped into my house just to get me confused.

And I wonder: how can anyone care about such matters? I realised then that I was behaving like those strange people who have no interest in sport whatsoever. Who simply don't get it. Who don't see the point, who think that getting excited because some millionaire kicked a bladder through two sticks is prima facie evidence of mental deficiency.

These people walk through Circe's magical land unenchanted, because they have taken the antidote. Once they have taken the magical herb, moly, nothing on the sports pages can touch them. Steven Gerrard's groin strain causes them no anxiety, even though he will miss the next two England matches.

They see nothing but money. They believe the Olympic Games are about nothing but money and politics. Such things are hardly irrelevant, but if the Olympic Games had nothing more, they would have no meaning and therefore no power. If football, if cricket, if any sport were about money only, no one would watch them.

Even in my distracted and alienated state, I know there is more. I know that once I have completed my rehab, I will be back caring about groin strains and Pietersen's leadership and Andy Murray's potential for ruling the world. This will take place, not just because it is my business to care, but because it is my natural, my default, state.

Those without sport see only the machine. They see only the folly, the futility, the money, the politics. All these things are real enough, but we who have sport in us see more. We are able to perceive the ghost that dwells inside the machine, the thing that animates sport, that makes it live in us, that makes us care about it, that thing that is beyond explanation. If you don't think it is rather marvellous that Pietersen can blast Brett Lee into pieces in the biggest match England have played in decades; if you don't think it is rather splendid that Gerrard can inspire Liverpool to victory against a better side when three goals down, if you don't think it is rather glorious that Murray may become a player of real substance then - well, I can't really help you to do so.

It's that little germ of psychic quality in you that matters, and you either have it or you don't. It's that little psychic bump that enables you to see the ghost in the machine. I would define that ghost as the human striving after victory, excellence, salvation. That psychic quality gives you the ability to see it, to respond to it, to empathise with it, to see that, although the activity itself is fraught with triviality and caught up in all kinds of nonsense, there is still that spark of something that matters.

Behind the cash and the politics, behind the hype and the nonsense, behind the cynicism and the disillusionment, comes the humanity. And that's sport. And I'll be ready for it again as soon as my rehab is completed. Perhaps KP and the lads can get me through it today.